Haden McAlpine
Haden McAlpine is a CISSP and ISO/IEC 27001 Lead Auditor with 25 years in IT, cyber security, cloud and infrastructure. He founded McAlpine Cyber and AI to give mid-sized companies the AI governance and senior security leadership that usually only large enterprises can afford.
CISSP (verify) · ISO/IEC 27001 Lead Auditor · Sydney, originally from New Zealand
What I work on
AI governance that gets used
ISO/IEC 42001, the NIST AI RMF, Australia’s Guidance for AI Adoption (AI6) and the EU AI Act, turned into an AI register, a policy people follow and controls that actually run. It sits on top of the ISO 27001 system you already have.
Securing agentic AI
MCP servers, Claude, ChatGPT and Copilot integrations, and data agents wired into production systems. I threat-model them against the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications, because I build them too.
Fractional CISO
Board reporting, security questionnaires, incident readiness and vendor risk for companies that need a CISO but can’t hire one full time.
How I work
I’ve sat in the room while a vendor tried to sell a board a six-figure platform to fix a problem a spreadsheet and a firm email would have solved. Twenty-five years across retail, manufacturing and financial services taught me that lesson more than once.
I’ve also watched consultants hand over a slide deck built to scare a board into a bigger contract, then leave before anyone had to run what they sold. That’s not how I work. If I recommend something, it’s usually because I’ve already built the version of it that gets used.
An AI-native practice
McAlpine Cyber and AI runs on its own AI staff: agents for research, lead qualification, drafting and publishing, each with scoped permissions, human approval before anything leaves the building, and an audit trail. The governance I recommend to clients is the governance I run on my own business first.
Speaking
I speak on AI governance, agentic AI security and leading through technology change, for boards, leadership teams, industry events and universities. My most recent talk was a Master of Business graduation address. To ask about an event, get in touch.